Tell me the story of the moment you realized you couldn’t get the food you needed.
Were you looking at an empty shelf at the store? Or into the delivery bags that had less than half of what you ordered online?
I arrive at the store mid-March, a bit startled to find the parking lot pretty packed. I’m annoyed to be navigating the produce section around so many other carts. OH shoot. No organic cabbage. Not too unusual, I’ll get something else, then looking up around at the organic section, it was pretty decimated. I’m on edge now as I weave through the aisles, seeing full carts, stocking up. There’s fervor in the air, and I catch the contagion, grabbing 3 of an item instead of two. I double back for an extra package of chicken for the freezer, and think to grab beef, oh… no grass fed beef left. Then no cage-free eggs, my favorite almond milk. Things were different after that day.
This was both a new kind of stress for me, and at the same time, familiar. I’m in recovery from disordered eating and this feeling is much like the anxiety I experienced joining friends at a restaurant during the hungry times and realizing there wasn’t anything on the menu I felt safe eating, but I’ve felt safe with food so long now, this feeling is strange.
Much of my recovery is based in access to healthy food I trust.
I was filled with resolve after that to get my hands on what I need even if I have to drive hours away to where people aren’t panicking yet to find it.
For me, the ability to get my hands on my favorite things wasn’t enough to ease this sense of anxiety and insecurity about my access to healthy food. Through FB marketplace I found a neighbor near me who sells eggs from his happy chickens and ducks! The generous rich yolk of a duck egg is a delicacy I wish on all people with tastebuds. An unexpected gift in this is the connection that grew with my new poultry farming neighbor friend. Our conversations at my egg pick up every other week are inspiring and heartening. Relationships like this one are invaluable in such times.
These connections give us a beautiful sense of security, much deeper than what you get finding what you need on the shelf.
Another result of this new anxiety was a resolve to garden. Because I’m not at my own place, staying with my Dad since the divorce, I was reluctant to put in the effort for a garden again, one that I may be leaving soon. But as my friend was starting seeds in early March, the sadness that I wasn’t also doing so became an unrelenting messenger, telling me that I need to do this, too, to make my heart happy. So by the time we started getting serious collectively about COVID, I had already ordered some seeds. By then I realized how much hope this was giving me. The promise of abundance in these little seeds had me excited to wake up every morning to learn more about how to create a heathy happy garden. In another month I’d signed up to do a permaculture design and teaching certification course.
The optimism of the permaculture approach to design is hopeful and inspiring. This is something I’ll spend the rest of my life learning and teaching, sharing.
The gentle lessons learned in the garden, watching life unfurl, watching the connections between blossom and bee, cabbage leaf and caterpillar, lead directly into the mystery. Life seems to unfurl for the joy of it. Why is there something rather than nothing? For this! Says the bud bursting open, the pod sprinkling its seeds to the wind. Some plants thrive, some wither from too much watering, or not enough, and their successors reach for the sun over their neighbors’ surrendered bodies. Life goes on in the garden, more and more complexity arises. Milkweed sprouts, a seed blown in, or dropped by a bird. Purslane, wood sorrel, dandelion. These surprise edibles join the celebration of existence in this little garden. I harvest them with gratitude, life feasting on life in this inescapable cycle.